Employment Contract-Based Management Model of Production Resources on Relation-Driven Fractal Organization

Abstract

Up-to-date market dynamics and intense competition have forced a production system to be more widely distributed and decentralized than ever, and the production system itself can be regarded as a collaborative network of autonomous production resources in which the responsibility of decision making is also decentralized into individual autonomous entities. The conventional resource management models, however, are not suitable for the distributed and decentralized environment because of their centralized nature. In this paper, an agent-based resource management model is proposed. The proposed model applies employment relation-driven fractal organization (FrOrg) into organizational model for distributed production resources and presents a resource management framework based on employment contracts. The fractal organization is a structured association in which a self-similar pattern recursively appears, and employment relations between production resources are recursively constructed throughout the entire production system.